This Collaborative Enhancement Project explores the development of ‘green skills’ to support employability, graduate outcomes, and the economy's needs.
Project lead: Oxford Brookes University
About this project
Green jobs are growing twice as fast as the number of workers skilled to fill them. Governments seek to accelerate progress towards net zero and support sustainable economic growth based on interconnected climate, biodiversity, and nature-related socially inclusive actions. Young people need the skills/competencies to contribute to a green economy and also expect to be involved in shaping related educational policymaking.
However, in the UK just 27% of young people have heard the phrase ‘green jobs’’. Universities can be key enablers of a transition to a green economy but risk ‘falling behind in the green skills race’.
This project brings together universities that already demonstrate strong applied practice in Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) to explore, in collaboration with students and employers, shared approaches for enhancing the development of ‘green skills’ to support employability, graduate outcomes, and the economy's needs.
The intended impacts of the project are:
- Evidence of enhanced integration of green skills in HEI curricula
- Increased sector-wide understanding of the nexus between ESD, employability and career learning, and green skills;
- Increased recognition of the role of ESD as a contributor to a green economy, by both institutions and policymakers.
The project is informed by the QAA/ AdvanceHE ESD Guidance (2021), the QAA CEP on Competence- Based Education Frameworks, and the literature on the technical as well as non-technical/transformative competencies highlighted inter alia in the European Green Competence Framework. Some project partners contributed to the ESD and Academic Quality CEP (2023), and this project will incorporate its outputs, including “recognising students as co-creators.”
This project could also facilitate the embedding of QAA Subject Benchmarks Statements’ ESD commitments, and the AdvanceHE employability framework that includes sustainability (2024).
The project will enhance students' employability and graduate careers by foregrounding green skills acquisition. Through amended curricula, students would become more aware of the demand for green skills, how to articulate these to employers, and how to apply them within all future roles, following EAUC (2023) that ‘every job is a green job’. This project has been co-designed with SOS-UK (Students Organising for Sustainability) and will be delivered closely with them. All five university partners already work closely with their Students’ Unions on sustainability, primarily through Responsible Futures, and have existing mechanisms for co-creation and student leadership.
The sector will benefit from increasing the employability of their graduates, aligning ESD efforts to government/economic priorities, ensuring the value of HE in upskilling the workforce to meet the UK’s sustainability ambitions is articulated, and from practical guidance on how to enhance green skills. This will consider both technical related competence enhancements and connections to existing sets of transferable/transformational skills.
The project also seeks to inform government policy making in the context of the newly established ‘Skills England’ agency.
Deliverables / Outcomes
Workstream 1: co-design and deliver student/staff/employer workshops exploring the alignment of ESD, current employability skills commitments, green workforce needs, and green skills.
Workstream 2: co-creation of guidance on Green Skills, published as a stand-alone guidance document and initially disseminated through a sector-wide webinar. Also to be shared at relevant conferences e.g. EAUC Conference, the PRME UK and Ireland conference, the QAA Conference, and the SOS-UK Student Sustainability Summit.
Workstream 3: a policy brief outlining the role of HEIs in green skills provision, and how ESD and green skills in HE can contribute to the UK’s net zero mission.
Workstream 4: an academic article, co-authored with students, exploring the related themes and reporting on project outcomes.
Dr Jonathan Louw is an Associate Professor of Management Education and Dr Karen Cripps is a Senior Lecturer in Responsible Management and Leadership at Oxford Brookes Business School.
Both are Senior Fellows of the HEA and have shared research interests at the intersection of sustainability and employability. Together they convene the Careers and Sustainability Working Group of the UK and Ireland Chapter of the UN Principles for Responsible Management Education initiative.
In 2025 they published a Sustainability in Early Careers research report in collaboration with the UN Global Compact Network UK and the sustainability reporting platform Windō.